We’re a small team of 9 women in Melbourne who’ve always believed business can be a force for good. Since 2002, we’ve grown slowly and steadily, creating beautiful, enduring pieces while caring for the people who make them and the planet we all share.

This year, our efforts were recognised with B Corp certification, meeting the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance. For us, it’s both a celebration of the way we’ve always worked and a commitment to keep improving, putting people and planet first.

Read on as Emily shares the story behind becoming B Corp certified and our goals for the future.

We’re so proud to share that Nancybird is now officially a Certified B Corporation. This milestone is both a recognition of our values and practices and a promise to keep going, keep improving and to show that people, planet and profit can co-exist in small business.

As a business that has been operating for 24 years, we have sharpened our focus over time on better ways to make. We have always valued natural materials and have long standing relationships with a mix of artisan makers and small audited factories – and now including B Corp methodologies, this has increased our accountability and given us a clear framework to reach for further improvements – and this is what is most exciting about this certification.

It was important for me to take Nancybird through this process to reach this certification for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, to have an external body measure what we are doing against global standards would give us a real picture of how we are operating. I am really proud as a small team, we have reached the gained the score of 97.4.

Secondly, to give us a framework to improve, as a small business, it can be difficult to know the actual steps to improvement – this certification process vastly improved our tracking of materials, material and factory certifications, water/electricity usage, our staff commutes, and our air vs sea freight. And from this clear position, it has meant we have been able to put targets in place to reduce emissions, to encourage improvements from our suppliers, and to increase our use of preferred materials.

And lastly, this certification gives you, our community, the confidence to choose Nancybird – that we are genuinely walking the talk.

Our certification is built on real, measurable practices across five key areas of business – governance, workers, community, environment and customers.

Our reporting period was from the 1st July 2023 to the 30th June 2024.

We achieved the score of 97.4 (a score of over 80 points must be reached for B Corp certification) You can visit our score here.

To compare with similar sized businesses:
Average score is 80.9.
Governance – average is 7.1, we reached 14.9
Workers – average is 15.7, we reached 20.1
Community – average is 21.5, we reached 23
Environment – average is 25.5, we reached 36.4
Customers – average is 1.9, we reached 2.9

*This average is calculated as the median of companies that have completed at least 75% of that given section

Some highlights of the data that came from our B Corp journey:
1. 97% of our material usage is biodegradable (non biodegradable materials include metal zips and hardware, fusing/glues, spandex)
2. Across the reporting period of July 2023- June 2024, $37,000+ was paid in artist licensing fees, supporting the artists and communities we collaborate with.
3. 61% of our cotton usage in the reporting period is GOTS certified organic (and we know this is much higher in more recent seasons)
4. We export WAY more solar electricity from our HQ solar panels to the grid than expected – we exported 4898 KWH solar energy to the grid (and used 2396 KWH grid electricity and 1725 KWH solar energy in our HQ)

To be quite honest, the journey to B Corp certification has been one of the more challenging tasks in my 24 years in business!

It was a huge undertaking to begin collecting the data needed for certification. I enlisted the help of Yvonne Barrett who is a B Corp consultant, to coach me for a couple of hours a week over some months, teaching me how to collect and arrange our data, and to navigate through the extensive questions in each focus area.

From these sessions I was able to go to our team, and each team member could collect information relevant to their role. It was very much a group effort!

One of the biggest challenges I found was accessing clear information on Scope 3 emissions – these are emissions that happen outside of our HQ, (such as the materials used in products and the manufacture of those items) – for a business like ours, that is where the vast majority of emissions happen. Detailed information does exist on how to calculate these emissions, but much of it behind very expensive industry memberships that are not accessible to small businesses.

If I could request anything from government organisations that could help businesses improve their practises, it would be this – provide free, detailed information for Scope 3 emissions (and I’ll just add into my government funded wish list - local textile recycling of mono fibre and mixed fibres – imagine the industry that could be created with this existing, freely available but wasted resource!)

I am so excited that we now have a framework and a snapshot of the reporting period to clearly see where we can make improvements.

We’re setting our sights on:

1. Creating our Nancybird Renew program to give products a longer life
2. 10% increase in use of certified materials (GOTS, FSC, LWG)
3. 25% reduction in carbon emissions from freight by increasing sea freight bulk deliveries and reducing air freight
4. Switching our artisan handwoven yarn from standard to GOTS organic cotton

See our Impact Report for more details. Our next B Corp assessment will be in February 2028 – we will continue to make improvements across all aspects of our business over this time.

We’re so grateful to every maker, artist and customer who’s been part of this journey so far. This milestone belongs to all of us the many hands and lives who make our work possible.